At it's best moments, the show hums along as good as any drama on television. But the penchant for melodrama and sweeping grand moments say space opera to me.

Not to get into one of those obnoxious pigeonholing arguments that populate the rest of the internet :)

In thinking about the early run of the show I think Moore and the writers just out-wrote themselves. They promised more and bigger and twistier and it just ended up getting muddled and overwrought. When they settled on that planet the show just seemed to take a very definite turn for the silly.

I thought Doc Cottle was the final Cylon. I thought he was the R. Daneel Olivaw like instigator of the whole multi-millenial cylon project. I thought what happened was that Earth's biosphere got sterilized in a long nuclear/biological conflict, and the remnant population was only human-like machines. These proto-cylons thought took it upon themselves to attempt to preserve and restore the Earth by growing a new, hardier, more perfect strain of humans, essentially cylons, on the new world of Kobol. At some point in that project there was an impasse in that the cylon strains that were fertile, could reprosuce like humans, were weak and fractious, while the ones that were strong and like minded tended to be too machine like and couldn't successfully interbreed. They decided they needed to accellerate the genetic diversity of the project by spreading the fertile, weak cylon population across 12 different environments and the monitor from a distance without interfering , to await the development of a stronger strain.

Unfortunately for that plan, what happened instead was that the weaker cylon population instead evolved to more and more purely human analogous - to the point they started to recapitulate the old human history - building thinking machines and the power to destroy themselves. At first the cylon observers allowed the first cylon war to happen, but eventually, to save the experiment they stepped in, took secret control of the rebellious "toaster" cylons and incorporated them into their own ranks, removing them from the colonies.

After this, there was a split in the thinking of the proto-cylons about the experiment, and while Doc Cottle & his side believed in the eventual success of the colonies, the 6's and her side decided that the experiment was useless and they should concentrate on making a breedable strong-cylon directly. This led to the annihilation of the colonies and all those weird breeding experiments done in the aftermath, which did finally succeed in producing a couple of strong-cylon babies (Athena's, Tyrol's and the one the 6 is now carrying).

Doc Cottle and other strong cylons sympathetic to the weak-cylon experiment (Tyrol, Anders, Tigh) embedded themselves in the colonial population when they knew the 6's would get their holocoust, and traveled with the fleet in sleeper mode (except for Cottle, who was aware all along, and put himself in the position of Doctor in order to a) keep an eye on the experiment and b) keep the other sleepers from being discovered too soon) to keep the experiment alive.

When Cottle became aware of the strong-cylon babies, and also the weirdness around Starbuck (who I figured was becoming some kind of new super-cylon out of the original experiment, as Cottle at first intended), he decided it was time to wrap the thing up and attempt to plant the new population back on Earth - so he activated the sleepers.

But essentially, everyone in the show is some brand of cylon or other.

Of course, this painstakingly constructed position of mine has crumbled since the last episode, but I still think something similar to this is going on - some combination of what orwellseyes said upthread and what Brent Wilcox said above. I concur with vrbtm's postulate. I honestly can't wait to find out how the details shake out!

but it's worth noting that the original series featured nightmare fodder like this.

But if you're an eight year old watching the original series at the time ( same age as the "Boxey" character shown above ), you would thing that it was the cooliest thing imaginable.Who wouldn't have want a robot dog ( "Dagget" ) as a kid?But then again, those were the ' 70's....

What the fuck was wrong with people back in the 70's? I mean, I assume there was a lot of cheap smoke and good coke, but fucking BOXEY? Why not name the little fucking "Table" or "Objecty" or "Coffin-fodder"?